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The National Australia Bank NAB has reportedly decided to outsource nearly 400 new jobs to India by the year end. The Bank has commenced its second round of its IT outsourcing program ITO Wave Two, and over the next phase, the Bank would examine offshoring up to 148 jobs from its Technology Banking, Australia TBA and Technology MLC divisions.The review will encompass TBAs three Melbournebased teams overseeing business and retail payments, Siebel and accounts services, and MLCs Sydney based mainframe team.
In its first outsourcing program ITO Wave One announced in March this year, about 264 technology jobs were earmarked for transfer to Indiabased software companies Satyam and Infosys by October. Nearly 100 jobs have already been outsourced to India .
NAB chief information officer Michelle Tredenick said that ITO Wave Two was a logical extension of the offshoring work started by the Bank earlier in the year. One of the ways we are transforming is by drawing on the capabilities and scale of global software service providers, the paper quoted Tredenick as writing an email to his technology staff.
As we have indicated over the last few months we intend to progress our offshoring activity, and earlier this year we expanded our use of offshoring partners Satyam and Infosys. We are looking to draw on these experiences and progress investigations into further functions, she said.
Meanwhile, a banking union is not happy at the banks decision to outsource jobs to India . Financial Services Union spokesman Rod Masson said he was disappointed to hear about the latest wave of offshoring at Australian banks. In the long term it will be demonstrated to be a shortsighted decision when Australian organisations are completely reliant on overseas companies and workers to service their essential IT platforms, which is inevitably where we see this heading, Masson said.
Since 20042005, NAB has been looking at the benefits of offshoring work, which together with other efficiency measures delivered the bank USD 279 million or Rs.12.09 billion in cost benefits, she added.
About 500 technology roles, including 200 permanent staff, will be impacted by the yearend. Over the past few years, NAB outsourced 500 backoffice jobs overseas, a good proportion in Bangalore, Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderabad.
During this period, the bank also added about 900 jobs to its Australian regional workforce.
Offshoring has improved NABs efficiency while employing more customerfacing staff to improve customer relationships, Lawrence said.
There has been a strong push towards specialisation in private and public banking for health, government, education and food and beverages, she added.
NABs technology business unit is in the final months of transitioning the first wave of 264 roles of which 111 are permanent staff and 153 are contract roles to an Indiabased supplier.
Within NABs permanent workforce, about 70 have chosen to take redundancy compensation, with the remainder to be redeployed.
Another review got underway this week in the banks technology division. About 171 roles are under review made up of 85 permanent and 86 contract based roles.
Technology staff were advised that the review will scope the benefits offshoring could deliver to NABs future capability requirements. A business case will be prepared at the end of the review outlining the next step, Lawrence said.
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